Entry #26 • May 19th, 2026

The Friendship Deficit

When my son received his Type 1 diabetes diagnosis in June of last year (how has it already been this long and yet also so short?—and we still have a lifetime ahead of us), a prayer formed in my heart almost instantly.

I knew his path would be hard. I knew it would be lonely in ways that most people would never see. He would carry hardships quietly, navigating things that would remain invisible to nearly everyone around him. And to be thrown into that reality at such a tender age—a teenager—I felt an enormous weight of concern for him.

So I asked God something very simple.

Please, please send him a friend.

Send him a friend who understands what he’s battling. Maybe another teen boy walking the same road. Someone who knows what this fight feels like from the inside.

And while I look forward to writing more someday about how I believe God has begun to answer that prayer in several beautiful ways for him…that’s not today’s story.

Today’s story reaches back to an earlier prayer. One I prayed months before my son’s diagnosis.

Back in January of 2025—before diabetes was even a whisper in my mind—I had my own deeply personal ask of God. Something I had wrestled with for years. But that January, it all came to a head.

I cried out to God in what felt like a moment of slight desperation. And honestly, it felt like a somewhat childish prayer.

“God. Please. I need a friend.”

But before I tell you the rest of that prayer, I need to back up a little and explain something I had been quietly wrestling with for much of my thirties.

I like making friends. Actually, I really like making friends. I always have. And for the most part, it comes naturally to me.

But somewhere along the way, that ease in making friends created a strange deficit in my friendships.

For most of my adult life, I operated with three very simple friendship categories in my head:
Best friends.
Close friends.
And then…basically everyone else I knew fell into a bucket labeled “friend.”

I never really questioned that framework until one of those “best friend” relationships was rocked to the core a few years ago.

Up until then, that simplistic system had seemed to work just fine. But as I got older, I slowly started realizing it actually didn’t provide much clarity around my friendships or how to best show up within them.

That first fracture in a “best friend” relationship forced me to start contending with something I had never really examined before: my actual definition of friendship—or more accurately, my lack of one.

I started realizing I needed more clarity around the different “levels” of friendship so I wasn’t quietly carrying unrealistic expectations in my head.

Then blow number two came.

I shared back in JM#18 about the loss of another longtime friendship—a relationship that slowly unraveled over time through her battle with alcoholism. I still carry grief over that loss. It still hurts.

Those back-to-back losses shook me deeply.

And when that second loss really settled in during January of 2025, it exposed something in me I hadn’t fully recognized before:

A kind of friendship loneliness.

I’m not even sure that’s the perfect phrase for it, but it’s the closest one I can come up with.

And to be clear, this wasn’t about a lack of meaningful people in my life. I have close friends that I deeply value. They’ve carried me through some incredibly hard seasons including this current one.

(And there are a few of them who read this email series, so honestly…special shoutout to them. They’re like the silent cheerleaders in the background, and I’m so incredibly grateful for them.)

The issue wasn’t that I lacked friendship. It was that I suddenly realized certain parts of my life felt unmatched relationally.

Because up until then, I had never really reexamined the framework of friendship I had carried with me since childhood.

For years, my “best friend” category had remained largely frozen in time—anchored to three friendships from high school that still carried enormous emotional significance in my mind simply because they always had.

In reality, those friendships no longer carried the same emotional depth as the small handful of close friends I speak with almost daily. Which, honestly, is a strange juxtaposition when you think about the labels I was using to categorize those relationships.

And when two of those three friendships unraveled within the span of a few years, it uprooted me more than I expected.

Not just because of the losses themselves, but because they forced me to start asking questions I had never really asked before.

Is there actually a difference between a best friend and a close friend?
What actually defines a close friendship?
What expectations are reasonable within different relationships?

If someone had asked me why certain people carried such enormous emotional significance in my life while others didn’t…I’m not sure I could have clearly explained it.

For most of my life, I think my heart wanted to believe that everyone could become a lifelong friend if we just knew each other long enough.

But that simply isn’t reality.

Some friendships are for a season. Some are tied to a specific chapter of life. Some grow deep roots and last decades. And some are torn apart by unhealthy choices—even when there was once real love and care.

I think I had spent years handing out emotional access without really stopping to ask whether that relationship actually made sense in the deeper parts of my life.

Not because anyone had done anything wrong. But because not every friendship is meant to carry the same level of intimacy, expectation, or weight.

And somewhere in all of that grief and reevaluation, I began realizing something else:

Friendship didn’t have to happen accidentally.

Perhaps I could intentionally build my friend group to be more diverse. Maybe I needed an older woman in my life—someone I could lean on for wisdom. Maybe I needed to add people with different world views, cultures, or ways of life to help broaden my understanding of others. Maybe I needed to deepen certain friendships I already had but had kept somewhat surface-level because of differences in personality or life stage.

For the first time in my life, I started realizing I could truly be intentional about who I surrounded myself with and where certain people fit within my life.

And out of that place—deep grief mixed with deeper understanding—that prayer finally came spilling out.

The Prayer I Finally Prayed Out Loud

“God. Please. I need a friend.”

But, I didn’t stop there.

I had spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of friendship that felt missing in my life. And eventually, I decided to just pray it out loud.

“God…not just any friend. I want a friend who is a Christian—unashamedly so. Someone who talks openly about her faith. Her struggles. Her convictions. Her praises.

But not just a Christian friend, Lord. I want a friend who has several kids like me. Ideally…five or more.

And I want her to have older kids. Kids around the ages of my oldest three boys—or maybe even a little older. Someone in the same stage of life as me…or maybe just a little ahead of me.

And God…one more thing.”

By this point, I remember feeling like I was already asking for too much. Like…this prayer was wildly specific. But I also thought “What do I have to lose?”

“If she could also be a business owner…please. I want a friend who gets it. Someone who understands the weight of raising several kids—older kids—while also carrying the responsibility of running a business.

Please, God.”

In the weeks that followed that prayer, I started mentally flipping through my internal Rolodex.

Was there someone already in my life that I was completely overlooking?

I remember talking with my mom about this. I mentioned a few women I wondered about—people who were already somewhere in my orbit but where the friendship still felt fairly surface-level. Maybe this person was right under my nose and I just wasn’t paying attention.

That spring, I casually went on a few coffee dates. None of these women knew that I was quietly hoping one of those conversations might grow into a deeper friendship.

But none of them fit all of the “silly” requirements I had laid out.

Christian.
Mom of five or more kids.
Mom of kids roughly 15–25 years old.
Business owner.

Those were the four internal checkboxes. And they were in that exact order.

As I looked around my social circle—and as I went on a few of those quiet coffee dates—the most overlap I could find was two of the four boxes.

Then sometime in April, a thought occurred to me that genuinely encouraged my heart:

There are still so many people in this world that I have not yet met. What if one of my future closest friends was still a complete stranger to me?

I started thinking about all the incredible friendships I’ve experienced over the first 39 years of my life. And if God gives me another 39 years…how many more incredible people might still be waiting ahead?

That thought alone gave me hope. It reminded me to stay open—to keep looking and keep asking questions.

Because sometimes the people who become the most important in our lives arrive from places we never expected.

The Summer Everything Changed

Then June came. And my world changed drastically.

I’ve written about that here more times than not. It’s what ultimately pushed me to begin the Just Me series in the first place. My son’s diagnosis shattered me in ways I didn’t know I could be shattered.

And yet, God has been incredibly kind and faithful through it all.

If you’re newer here, I’d encourage you to go back and read JM#3. That entry is where so much of this series was born.

And for the rest of you—those who have so gently walked through this with me—thank you. Truly. You have been the most kind and compassionate readership I could ever imagine.

When we returned home from that life-altering family vacation, I was operating almost entirely from shock.

We got back on a Friday. By Monday morning, my husband was already leaving the state with three of our teenage boys—including the one with the new diagnosis—for youth camp. That left me at home trying to bring order back to the house after nearly a month away.

My mom stepped in to help with the younger kids because I had planned to return to work and try to get back into the rhythm of normal life.

But if I’m honest, I was in the thickest fog imaginable.

Less than a week after returning home, I decided to go up to my parents’ cabin for two nights. I just needed a moment to breathe. To gather myself. To try to make sense of what our new life was going to look like.

The morning I planned to head to the cabin, I stopped first at a meeting for downtown business owners. It was being held at a downtown restaurant and coffee spot.

On my way in, I ran into a fellow mom from our homeschool sports league. She was having lunch with another mom—someone I knew of but didn’t really know personally.

They said hello and asked how my son was doing with the new diagnosis. They had heard through the grapevine.

It was honestly a difficult moment to be asked that question. My mind was still completely scrambled. During that stage, anyone who asked me about the diagnosis essentially got word-vomited on. I had absolutely no filter yet.

I was deep in the verbal-processing phase of grief and shock and had very little awareness of what was appropriate to say versus what might have been too much.

(And honestly, to anyone who happened to be on the receiving end of that phase without being in my close inner circle…I’m sorry. I still carry a surprising amount of guilt about that.)

But they were both incredibly kind and patient with me as I talked.

The mom I didn’t know very well eventually said, “Hey, I have a friend whose son was diagnosed with that a couple of years ago. I think he’s around the same age as your son. Would you want me to connect you two?”

I told her yes—that would be great.

And then, if I’m being honest, I didn’t think about it again.

I thanked them for asking about my son, finally pulled myself away from the conversation, and went into my meeting.

A couple of weeks later, I received a text from the mom I had spoken with outside the meeting that morning.

Her message was long and thoughtful. She explained that she had reached out to her friend, and that her friend was willing to be a “lifeline” for me as I learned to navigate this new diagnosis with my son. Her son had also been diagnosed two years earlier—as a young teenager.

When she told me who her friend was, I actually chuckled to myself.

It was someone I had heard about for years in a professional sense. We both work with the same demographic of people—expecting families—so our paths had overlapped professionally many times.

But we had never actually met.

A few days later, I reached out to her by text.

I had some very specific questions about the care providers we were beginning to work with—the same clinic her son attends. (It’s the primary clinic caring for Type 1 Diabetes kids across Colorado.)

She graciously spent time on the phone with me while I drove to Denver for our first appointment there.

Most of my questions were practical. I wanted to know if there were certain things I should be asking during those early training appointments while we had the professionals’ attention.

Then I didn’t speak with her again for several weeks.

If I Could Just Water the Succulents

By the time August rolled around, I was knee-deep in the muck of grief, hospital billing complications, and the attempt to return to work. I was hanging by a thread in nearly every area of life.

It was during that month that Just Me began.

What I had envisioned for years—a format where I could process life and tell stories through writing—finally took root in the soil of deep grief.

In September, I started to feel like I could come up for a gasp of air.

I replied to a text she had sent back in July. It had been sitting there unanswered for weeks. She had taken the time to share several helpful pieces of information about the diagnosis and things that had worked well for their family.

But at the time, I simply couldn’t process any of it. Everything felt overwhelming. Even helpful information felt heavy.

My reply reopened the line of communication between us.

I started asking a few questions, and then a few more. By then we were about four months into the diagnosis, and it felt like I was beginning to gain the slightest foothold.

In early October, we started texting a little more regularly. She was incredibly helpful with some of the logistical pieces—things like navigating pharmacy orders and managing supplies—but she also listened as I shared some of the grief I was working through.

The grief. Man, she understood that piece in a way no one else did.

Two things she told me during that season have stayed lodged in my mind ever since.

First, she said she cried every day during the first year after her son’s diagnosis—from the grief, the overwhelm, and everything in between. I remember initially thinking that sounded a little extreme. But as time has gone on…I understand it now.

And then she told me about her succulents.

She watched them nearly die because even giving them a little water had felt emotionally overwhelming. She would try to rally herself to “…just…water…the succulents.”

That resonated deeply. I felt it to my core.

Still, even now—eleven months in—when I get hit with a wave of grief or find myself drowning in the wake of this diagnosis, I think about her succulents.

If I could just…water…the succulents.

The Friend God Was Already Preparing

By mid-October, we started talking about meeting in person.

The only complication was geography. She doesn’t live here in Grand Junction—she lives over an hour away.

Early in our conversations, I briefly wondered if maybe her son was the friend I had prayed for back in June for my son. But knowing the distance between us, I assumed it would be difficult for the boys to connect very often.

Still, I knew I wanted to meet her.

In the last week of October, our schedules finally lined up. She was coming to Grand Junction for the day and wanted to stop by and see the store.

We decided to meet at Kiln for matcha (which we discovered is both of our favorite drinks) and then walk over to Colorado Baby afterward.

I can’t fully explain what happened that afternoon.

We sat on a bench outside Kiln in the fall sunshine, sipping matchas together. The air had that crisp fall feel to it. As we sat there, completely enraptured in conversation, people milled about downtown like any other Saturday—busy and humming along. But for us, it felt like time was almost standing still.

And something about that conversation felt…divinely orchestrated. Our hearts felt knit together in a way that is difficult for me to explain apart from God.

She told me about her five kids and what their life had looked like in recent years. (Five kids…)

How her family had spent time living overseas as missionaries. (Christian…)

She shared what her oldest daughter—twenty years old—was doing now, and what the rest of the kids were up to. (Kids aged 8–20…)

She told me about her past work in midwifery and where she sensed that work might be heading in the future. She shared about two product lines she was developing and how she hoped to grow them. (Business owner…)

At some point during those three hours, I realized something incredible:

We hadn’t talked about diabetes once.

Which was wild—because that had been the very thing that connected us in the first place.

It was such a relief to talk about life beyond diabetes.

When she left that afternoon, I remember standing there for a moment thinking something about that felt different. I couldn’t quite put words to it, but the thought lingered.

Could this be the friend I had prayed for?

The very next day she texted me. She asked if I would want to pray together regularly as we both navigated small business ownership, motherhood, and raising older kids.

Over these past seven months, as I’ve continued wading through this diagnosis, I’ve had a new friend helping me bear the weight of it all.

And not just the diagnosis itself, but the way it bleeds into every other part of life.

Raising kids in so many different ages and stages at once has felt heavier than ever. And my business—though I love it deeply—has felt unbelievably crushing since my son’s diagnosis.

Often, I still find myself thinking:

If I could just…water…the succulents.

One Unseen Checkbox

Speaking of succulents, this God-sent friend happened to be in town this past week and told me she wanted to take me out for breakfast for my birthday.

Neither of us are huge breakfast people, so originally we talked about just getting matcha at Kiln. But then she texted me saying she had tried a little restaurant on Main Street a couple of months earlier and wondered if I wanted to go there instead.

With a little internal smirk, I told her yes—I liked that place and hadn’t been there in a while.

Ten months, to be exact.

The last time I had been there was the morning I walked into that downtown meeting back in July.

Yeah…the very restaurant where I had unknowingly first learned about her existence through those two women who connected us.

Once we got our food, she motioned toward a table to sit at—just one table over from where I had first heard about her ten months earlier.

And as we sat there, she handed me a birthday gift:

A beautiful journal.
A pen.
Chapstick.
And…a succulent.

In the card she wrote:

“This succulent is in the Jade family. They are hard to kill, so I’m confident it should see you through any trial.”

As I reflect on these past sixteen months, I am honestly speechless.

I still can’t quite believe how intentionally God answered that prayer—hand-picking a friend who checked every one of those four “silly” internal checkboxes I had prayed about.

And even more than that, He checked a fifth box I never would have thought to include back in January of 2025:

Mothering a teenage son with Type 1 Diabetes.

Looking back now, I can see something I couldn’t see then.

In the middle of the hardest season of my life, God had already been moving pieces into place.

He saw the loss.
He saw the grief.
He saw the loneliness.
And He saw the checkbox I didn’t even know existed yet.

Not only did He answer my prayer.

He answered the one I didn’t know life would ask of me.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you one last detail.

This new friend God sent me…you’ll never believe her name.

It’s Hope.

-Just Me[gan]